An investigation into the impact of virtual reality character presentation on participants’ depression stigma

There is a large body of research investigating who stigmatises mental illnesses, why they do so, and the factors that mediate these thoughts and behaviours. Depression stigma in particular has been widely studied using written vignettes to depict a character with depression. While vignettes provide easily manipulatable experimental tools for measuring people’s reactions to a diagnosed character, they lack the capacity to depict a character’s expressions and actions. This has led to concerns about their ecological validity. This study attempted to increase the ecological validity of traditional vignette studies by presenting a virtual character and then measuring the participant’s stigma towards depression. Participants were presented with either a depression or control vignette and then both groups interacted with a virtual human with experimentally manipulated eye contact behaviours. Initial exploration of the data suggests that previously reported effects of diagnosis when using written vignettes may not generalise to more dynamic and interactive virtual social situations, and thus may not hold up in real life situations. The use of virtual reality uniquely allowed for testing such complex questions..